[elrepo-devel] ATI driver

[Phil Perry]

On 08/12/10 20:33, Marco Giunta wrote:
>> Hi Marco,
>>
>> Nice job on the packages!
>>
>
> Thank you, it's only a little job compared to what ElRepo maintainers do
> for all of us ...
>
>> I'm particularly interested in your ati-config-display utility as that
>> is something that we are missing. My python skills are non-existent, but
>> diffing our nvidia-config-display against your ati-config-display I can
>> probably just about figure out what you've done. Interesting that you
>> handle the ldconfig stuff from there rather than in the package
>> scriptlets. Would you be able to help in updating it if necessary to
>> support the latest driver once we know exactly what is needed.
>>
>
> Of course I can help you to support latest driver; in our college, there
> aren't workstations with Ati video cards that need a newer driver, but my
> home pc has a Ati HD3300, so I can use it  ...
>

Brilliant!

>> Also, as you have some experience with older cards, can you explain the
>> position on support for older ATI hardware. From what I understand,
>> older hardware is only supported by older driver revisions, which are
>> still available for download. So we could provide legacy drivers for
>> folks with older cards (like we currently do for nvidia)
>>
>
> You are right: ATI has dropped support for all cards previous than X2100
> series in Catalyst 9.4 driver release, so 9.3 version is the last version
> that one can use for a 'legacy' card.
>
>> Are these older series drivers still supported/maintained by ATI?
>
> On 9.3 drivers release notes page is written:
>
> '''
> AMD may periodically provide Windows XP and Windows Vista driver updates
> (for the products listed above) for critical fixes only.  No new features
> will be provided in future driver updates.  The Linux ATI Catalyst™ driver
> will only be supported in Linux distributions prior to February 2009 for
> the legacy products listed above.
> '''
>
> so, I suppose that Windows 9.3 version could be updated, but they don't
> speak about linux version ...
>

OK, so basically unsupported.

>>
>> Which driver series support which cards - in other words, which would
>> make good candidates for inclusion in elrepo as legacy drivers.
>>
>
> You can find all supported cards on unofficial Ati wiki:
>
> http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Hardware#RADEON
>
> or in release notes of 9.3 driver:
>
> http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Legacy/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.12&lang=English
>

OK, so it might also be worth doing a legacy version based on the 9.3 
release, but it looks as if that might only be possible for EL5 as that 
it states above that "currently there is NO support for 2.6.29 or newer 
kernels."

Anyway, lets concentrate on the current driver first.

>> Apologies for all the questions - I'm a nvidia user so am not at all
>> familiar with the ATI drivers.
>>
>
> Never mind, I repeat: ElRepo's kmods have saved me a lot of time, that I
> MUST help you in someway ...
>
>
>    Marco
>

Thanks again Marco.

I hope to have the kmod-fglrx packages built by the weekend for both el5 
and el6, and then we can make a start packaging the libs in an 
accompanying xorg-x11-drv-fglrx package.